Booker, North, and Willis on the IPCC Amazongate affair

In the news this week, lots of agitation over some questionable science from an NGO wrongly cited by the IPCC, and a newspaper that caved to pressure.

The two journalists who originally broke the story “Amazongate”, Booker and North, were covered on WUWT last January. See links here and here. Now with new developments and a retraction by The Sunday Times, the controversy erupts anew.

Booker has taken on board the “Amazongate” developments in this week’s column. Interestingly, rather than me, it was Booker who suggested “going big” on the issue this week, his motivation in part being the intervention by George Monbiot, who has been his usual charmless self, parading the ugly face of warmism in all its triumphant ghastliness.

It is indeed getting ugly these days. It will likely get uglier as November elections in the USA approach. There’s a sense of panic afoot as some people know their window of opportunity is closing. Copenhagen failed, Cap and Trade in the US looks to be failed, Australia’s ETS is put on hold, and many other political objectives that are the result of an oversold set of actions are also unraveling.

Yes, the panic driven ugliness will get worse before it gets better.

The warmist community has gone into serious overdrive this week following the apology and correction in last week’s Sunday Times over its reporting last January of the IPCC scandal known as Amazongate.

The reason for all this? WWF, (World Wildlife Fund) which all you need to know. WWF is not peer reviewed science, it’s a billion dollar business with an agenda. When that business and it’s opinionated agenda driven output gets used in place of peer reviewed science, then all hope is lost for the integrity of science everywhere.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

The WWF, in my view, is a poison pill for science. They should be avoided for any references in peer reviewed papers and in journalism.

In addition to the EuReferendum and Christopher Bookers column, we also have a fresh analysis by Willis Eschenbach on WUWT also well worth reading. This graph he produced sums up the entire issue succinctly: there’s no trend.

UPDATE: Shub Niggurath suggests that no peer reviewed science references existed in first and second order IPCC drafts:

More importantly, contrary to what many have suggested, it does not seem, that a statement was formulated assessing all available literature at the time. The sentence in question remained virtually unchanged through the drafts (except for the ‘drastic’ addition), it referred to the same WWF report through three different versions.

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